Donald Kaul: My broken heart

Tuesday

I celebrated the Fourth of July by having a heart attack. All things considered, watching fireworks would have been more fun.

I celebrated the Fourth of July by having a heart attack. All things considered, watching fireworks would have been more fun.

I woke up at 2 a.m. on July 5 with raging pain in my chest and both arms. I was bathed in a cold, clammy sweat, and my breath was coming short. I was slightly nauseous.

It went on like that for a few hours until my wife woke up and convinced me to get help. An ambulance brought me to the emergency room, where a team of doctors, nurses, attendants, and God-knows-who else was waiting for me.

It was like being sent through a cardiac car wash. I went in on one end with a heart attack; I came out the other an hour later with an unblocked artery, a stent, and an optimistic prognosis. They told me they expected me to return to close to 100 percent. (This was particularly good news as I havenít been close to 100 percent in years, if ever.)

If you take only one thing away from the newspaper today, let it be this:

If you start showing symptoms of a heart attack, even if theyíre not as dramatic as mine, donít screw around. Call 911 and have an ambulance take you to the hospital.

As a cardiologist friend told me: ďThey say time is money, but in my business time is muscle.Ē The longer you take to get treatment, the more heart muscle is destroyed ó permanently.

The upshot of this is that Iíve suspended writing this column indefinitely. (I can hear the moans of anguish across the nation now.)

And thereís a real question as to whether Iíll start writing it again when I feel better. (I can hear the cheers and shouts of triumph drowning out the moans.)

Iím 77 years old. Iíve been writing columns for nearly 50 years, 35 years of it in Washington. I can tell you things have changed, and not for the better.

Iíve covered fools, crooks and charlatans. But for the most part, they had some sense of seriousness about them ó an appreciation for the national interest as they saw it.

The current bunch of miscreants is nothing like that. Centrist Democrats, who talk a good game but donít do much about it, are battling increasingly radical Republicans, a fierce tribe of Bible-thumping know-nothings fueled by money from modern Robber Barons who want to sell the country off by the board foot and metric ton for their personal profit.

Do I want to spend my time left deciphering such people, trying to decide whether the Republican leaders are as stupid as they sound or merely willfully ignorant?

We are well on our way toward becoming a nation on the colonial model, where a few people own everything and the rest of us play the lottery and watch football. Thatís not the America I grew up in. Itís not the America I spent my life writing about.

I have to figure out whether I want to spend my last years writing about this new country.

Iíll let you know.

Donald Kaul, of Ann Arbor, Mich., worked for 30 years as a Washington, D.C., columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes for OtherWords, a distributor of commentary and cartoons aimed at amplifying progressive analysis in the national conversation.

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